Re: Minutes: Foreign OSes BoF



13 mar 2008 kl. 10.13 skrev Alberto Ruiz:

Hi Alberto,

Thanks for sharing the results of the BoF!

Looks like you had a good discussion.

Cheers,
  Micke

Hi,
this is some sort of summary of the issues discussed in the foreign OSes BoF at the hackfest.
Attendees:
tml, jdahlin, rhult, kris, bratsche and myself were there.

The discussion was focussed on Win32 and OSX, and we identified the main challenges there.
The problems:
* We tried to identify the reason because people are choosing wxWidgets or Qt over Gtk+, it's not a technical issue rather than a marketing one. People feel like wxWidgets is better because they use native widgets, improving the engine and the dialog look and feel would help there. * It's really hard for application developers to figure out how to create and deploy an application out of the linux environment. We should provide better developer tools. * Regarding the previous point, we should provide better installers of the Gtk+ runtime that can be reused from their development environment so people don't have to rebuild Gtk+ themselves and distribute a custom version.
The status:
* Backends: rhult keeps working hard to get the Mac OSX one into shape, it seems that we're not far to get there. bratsche and tml are rocking on the win32 front, it's been working for a while now, and besides some glitches, it's in an acceptable state at this point.
* Engines: both needs some love, the win32 one is almost into an  
acceptable shape, whereas  the Mac OS X one still nees some love,  
although it's getting along pretty well.
*Development tools: kris got XCode integration working, it would be  
nice to automate the generation of the XCode template installer and  
kind of make it a mainstream process. As for Visual Studio, bratsche  
and I am going to start getting into Visual Studio to see if we can  
come up with something similar.
*Packaging: On OSX seems to be pretty much there for Gtk+  
installation, not a big deal anyway. On the Win32 front we are close  
to have a componentized .msi installer.
The plans:
We splitted the target audience for this effort into two: Gtk+ Application developers, and Gtk+ developers. We're going to focus first in the first ones. And hold the discussion about people wanting to hack on gtk+ using the development environments on osx and win32.
First step: Let's have a clear and only answer for people willing to  
create and distribute/deploy applications on those platforms.
We got to the conclusion that we should encourage apps to  
redistribute gtk+ bundled with their apps, but make sure that they  
don't build it themselves, so we don't have dozens of incompatible  
binaries out there.
For win32 we want to research if we could reduce the complexity of  
the runtime by trying to come up with a single .dll and bundle  
the .mo catalog files so we end up with less unix hierarchy involved  
in the runtime. This is not a problem at all on OSX though.
We're going to try to push this as a consistent effort between the  
win32 and osx gangs. Once we have most of the goals there, we will  
be able to start to send the message that Gtk+ is getting real  
native :)
That's pretty much it, If someone from the BoF feels like I missed  
something please add your comments.
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz _______________________________________________
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